Three IARLD members, Susan Galletly, David Share and Bruce Knight, have recently issued a Call to Research:
English-Readers Experience Exceptionally Impeded Learning:
A Call to Research on Orthographic Impacts on Literacy and Learning.Recognizing its importance and relevance, IARLD is actively promoting this Call to Research, distributing it to members, interested others, and organisations focused on optimising literacy and learning development.
You can download the Call to Research here. Please pass it on to others.
The abstract of the Call to Research is as follows:
What factors cause children in Anglophone nations such as USA, UK and Australia to have
such slow development of word-reading, spelling, and independent reading and writing, relative to
children in the world’s many regular-orthography nations, e.g., Finland, Estonia, Korea, Taiwan, China,
and Japan? Why do so many English readers struggle with word-reading and spelling, and
independent reading, writing and learning, when this is not happening in so many other nations?
Why do children in regular-orthography nations have so much stronger learning skills for subject-area
learning from Grade 1, which Anglophone children lack?
The next decades will be an exciting time in literacy research, as we learn more and more about how
children learn to read and write, and how we can best optimise their learning.
This Call to Research calls to those across nations in the many disciplines working with children, and
conducting research on areas impacting literacy development – researchers, teachers, educators,
Special Education staff, psychologists and neuropsychologists, speech language pathologists,
occupational therapists, social workers, sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and all.
The Call was written in response to presentations and discussions held prior to and at the
International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities (IARLD) 45th Annual Conference held at
the University of Florida, in October 2023.
It is a call to include in our work a focus on crosslinguistic differences and orthographic impacts on
early-literacy development, education and society, through their effects on
- The cognitive load of the learning children must achieve,
- The demands this makes on children’s cognitive-processing skills, self-esteem, and confidence, and
- The extent of workload this creates for children, teachers, schools and education systems.
While written in particular to academics in Anglophone nations, it is a global call.